What with one thing and another she was a whole new story. No better time to tell herself to the world than the present.

Tomorrow might never come.

PART SIX.

IN SECRETS, MOST REVEALED.

I.

Tommy-Ray had been in the driver's seat of a car since his sixteenth birthday. Wheels had signalled freedom from Momma, the Pastor, the Grove and all they stood for. Now he was heading back to the very place a few years ago he couldn't have escaped from fast enough, his foot on the accelerator every mile of the way. He wanted to walk the Grove again with the news his body carried, wanted to go back to his father, who'd taught him so much. Until the Jaff the best life had offered was an off-sh.o.r.e wind and a west swell at Topanga; him on a crest knowing the girls were all watching him from the beach. But he'd always known those high times couldn't last forever. New heroes came along, summer after summer. He'd been one of them, supplanting surfers no more than a couple of years older, who weren't quite as lithe. Boy-men like himself who'd been the cream of the swell the season before, suddenly old news. He wasn't stupid. He knew it was only a matter of time before he joined their ranks.

But now, he had a purpose in his belly and brain he'd never had before. He'd discovered ways to think and behave the airheads at Topanga never even guessed existed. Much of that he had to thank the Jaff for. But even his father, for all his wild advice, hadn't prepared him for what had happened at the Mission. He was a myth now. Death at the wheel of a Chevy, racing for home. He knew music that would have people dancing till they dropped. And when they dropped, and went to meat, he knew all about that too. He'd seen the spectacle at work on his own flesh. It gave him a b.o.n.e.r remembering.

But the night's fun had only just started. Less than a hundred miles north of the Mission his route took him through a small village on the fringes of which lay a cemetery. The moon was still high. Its brightness gleamed on the tombs, washing the color from the flowers that were laid here and there. He stopped the car, to get a better look. After all, this was his territory from now on. It was home.

If he'd needed any further proof that what had happened at the Mission was not the invention of a crazyman, he got it when he pushed open the gate and wandered in. There was no wind to stir the gra.s.s, which grew to knee height in several places, where tombs had been left untended. But there was movement there nevertheless. He advanced a few more paces, and saw human figures rising into view from a dozen places. They were dead. Had their appearance not testified to the fact the luminescence of their bodies-which were as bright as the bone shard he'd found beside the car-would have marked them as part of his clan.

They knew who had come to visit them. Their eyes, or in the case of the ancients among them, their sockets, were set on him as they moved to do him homage. None even glanced at the ground as they came, though it was uneven. They knew this turf too well, familiar with the spots where badly built tombs had toppled, or a casket been pushed back up to the surface by some motion in the earth. Their progress was, however, slow. He was in no hurry. He sat himself down on the grave which contained, the stone recorded, seven children and their mother, and watched the ghosts come his way. The closer they came the more of their condition he saw. It wasn't pretty. A wind blew out of them, twisting them out of true. Their faces were either too wide or too long, their eyes bulging, their mouths blown open, cheeks flopping. Their ugliness put Tommy-Ray in mind of a film he'd seen of pilots enduring G-force, the difference being that these were not volunteers. They suffered against their will.

He was not disturbed in the least by their distortions; nor by the holes in their wretched bodies, or their slashed and severed limbs. It was nothing he hadn't seen in comic books by the age of six; or on a ghost-train ride. The horrors were everywhere, if you wanted to look. On bubble-gum cards, and Sat.u.r.day morning cartoons, or in the stores on T-shirts and alb.u.m covers. He smiled to think of that. There were outposts of his empire everywhere. No place was untouched by the Death-Boy's finger.

The speediest of these, his first devotees, was a man who looked to have died young, and recently. He wore a pair of jeans two sizes too big for him, and a muscle shirt adorned with a hand presenting the f.u.c.k sign to the world. He also wore a hat, which he took off when he came within a few yards of Tommy-Ray. The head beneath had been practically shaved, exposing several long cuts to view. The fatal wounds, presumably. There was no blood out of them now; just a whine of the wind that blew through the man's gut.

A little distance from Tommy-Ray he stopped.

"Do you speak?" the Death-Boy asked him.

The man opened his mouth, which was already wide, a little wider, and proceeded to make a reply as best he could, by working it up from his throat. Watching him, Tommy-Ray remembered a performer he'd seen on a late show, who'd swallowed and then regurgitated live goldfish. Though it was several years ago the sight had struck a chord in Tommy-Ray's imagination. The spectacle of a man able to reverse his system by practice, vomiting up what he'd held in his throat-not in the stomach surely; no fish, however scaly, could survive in acid-had been worth the queasiness he'd felt while watching. Now the f.u.c.k-You-Man was giving a similar performance, only with words instead of fishes. They came at last, but dry as his innards.

"Yes," he said, "I speak."

"Do you know who I am?" Tommy-Ray asked.

The man made a moan.

"Yes or no?"

"No."

"I'm the Death-Boy, and you're the f.u.c.k-You-Man. How 'bout that? Don't we make a pair?"

"You're here for us," the dead man said.

"What do you mean?"

"We're not buried. Not blessed."

"Don't look at me for help," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm burying n.o.body. I came to look because this is my kind of place now. I'm going to be King of the Dead."

"Yes?"

"Depend on it."

Another of the lost souls-a wide hipped woman-had approached, and puked up some words of her own.

"You..." she said, "...are shining."

"Yeah?" said Tommy-Ray. "Doesn't surprise me. You're bright too. Real bright."

"We belong together," the woman said.

"All of us," said a third cadaver.

"Now you're getting the picture."

"Save us," said the woman.

"I already told the f.u.c.k-You-Man," Tommy-Ray said, "I'm burying n.o.body."

"We'll follow you," the woman, said.

"Follow?" Tommy-Ray replied, a shudder of excitement running down his spine at the idea of returning to the Grove with such a congregation in tow. Maybe there were other places he could visit along the way, and swell the numbers as he went.

"I like the idea," he said. "But how?"

"You lead. We'll follow," came the response.

Tommy-Ray stood up. "Why not?" he said, and started back towards the car. Even as he went he found himself thinking: this is going to be the end of me...

And thinking, didn't care.

Once at the wheel he looked back towards the cemetery. A wind had blown up from somewhere, and in it he saw the company that he'd chosen to keep seem to dissolve, their bodies coming undone as though they were made of sand, and being blown apart. Specks of their dust blew in his face..He squinted against it, unwilling to look away from the spectacle. Though their bodies were disappearing he could still hear their howls. They were like the wind, or were the wind, making their presence known. With their dissolution complete he turned from the blast, and put his foot on the accelerator. The car leapt forward, kicking up another spurt of dust to join the pursuing dervishes.

He had been right about there being more places along the route to gather ghosts. I'll always be right from now on, he thought. Death's never wrong; never, ever wrong. He found another cemetery within an hour's drive of the first, with a dust dervish of half-dissolved souls running back and forth along its front wall like a dog on a leash, impatiently awaiting the arrival of its master. Word of his coming had gone before him apparently. They were waiting, these souls, ready to join the throng. He didn't even have to slow the car. At his approach the dust storm came to meet him,, momentarily smothering the vehicle before rising to join the souls behind. Tommy-Ray just drove straight on.

Towards dawn his unhappy band found yet more adherents. There had been a collision at a crossroads, earlier in the night. There was broken gla.s.s scattered across the road; blood; and one of the two cars-now barely recognizable as such- overturned at the side of the road. He slowed to look, not expecting there to be any haunters here, but even as he did so he heard the now familiar whining wind and saw two wretched forms, a man and a woman, appear from the darkness. They'd not yet got the trick of their condition. The wind that blew through them, or out of them, threatened with every faltering step they took to throw them over on to their broken heads. But newly dead as they were, they sensed their Lord in Tommy-Ray, and came obediently. He smiled to see them; their fresh wounds (gla.s.s in their faces, in their eyes) excited him.

There was no exchange of words. As they drew closer they seemed to take a signal from their comrades in death behind Tommy-Ray's car, allowing their bodies to erode completely, and join the wind.

His legion swelled, Tommy-Ray drove on.

There were other such meetings along the way; they seemed to multiply the further north he drove, as though word of his approach went through the earth, from buried thing to buried thing, graveyard whispers, so that there were dusty phantoms waiting all along the way. By no means all of them had come to join the party. Some had apparently come simply to stare at the pa.s.sing parade. There was fear on their faces when they looked at Tommy-Ray. He'd become the Terror in the ghost-train now, and they were the chilled punters. There were hierarchies even among the dead it seemed, and he was too elevated a company for many of them to keep; his ambition too great, his appet.i.te too depraved. They preferred quiet rot to such adventure.

It was early morning by the time he reached the nameless hick-town in which he'd lost his wallet, but the daylight did not reveal the host in the dust storm that followed him. To any who chose to look-and few did, in such a blinding wind-a cloud of dirty air came in the car's wake; that was the sum of it.

He had other business here than the collecting of lost souls-though he didn't doubt for a moment that in such a wretched place life was quickly and violently over, and many bodies never laid to sanctified rest. No, his business here was revenge upon the pocket-picker. Or if not upon him, at least upon the den where it had happened. He found the place easily. The front door wasn't locked, as he'd expected at such an early hour. Nor, once he stepped inside, did he find the bar empty. Last night's drinkers were still scattered around the place, in various stages of collapse. One lay face down on the floor, vomit spattered around him. Another two were sprawled at tables. Behind the bar itself was a man Tommy-Ray vaguely remembered as the doorman who'd taken his money for the backroom show. A lump of a man, with a face that looked to have been bruised so many times it'd never lose the stain.

"Looking for someone?" he demanded to know.

Tommy-Ray ignored him, crossing to the door that let on the arena where he'd seen the woman and the dog performing. It was open. The s.p.a.ce beyond was empty, the players gone home to their beds and their kennels. The barman was a yard from him when he turned back into the bar.

"I asked a f.u.c.king question," he said.

Tommy-Ray was a little taken aback by the man's blindness. Did he not recognize the fact that he was speaking to a transformed creature? Had his perception been so dulled by years of drinking and dog-shows he couldn't see the Death-Boy when he came visiting? More fool him.

"Get out of my way," Tommy-Ray said.

Instead, the man took hold of the front of Tommy-Ray's shirt. "You been here before," he said.

"Yeah."

"Left something behind, did you?"

He pulled Tommy-Ray closer, till they were practically nose to nose. He had a sick man's breath.

"I'd let go if I were you," Tommy-Ray warned.

The man looked amused at this. "You're looking to get your f.u.c.king b.a.l.l.s ripped off," he said. "Or do you want to join the show?" His eyes widened at this notion. "Is that what you came looking for? An audition?"

"I told you..." Tommy-Ray began.

"I don't give a f.u.c.k what you told me. I'm doing the talking now. Hear me?" He put one vast hand over Tommy-Ray's mouth. "So...do you want to show me something or not?"

The image of what he'd seen in the room behind him came back into Tommy-Ray's head as he stared up at his a.s.saulter: the woman, gla.s.sy-eyed; the dog, gla.s.sy-eyed. He'd seen death here, in life. He opened his mouth against the man's palm, and pressed his tongue against the stale skin.

The man grinned.

"Yeah?" he said.

He dropped his hand from Tommy-Ray's face. "You got something to show?" he said again.

"Here..." Tommy-Ray murmured.

"What?"

"Come in...come in..."

"What are you talking about?"

"Not talking to you. Here. Come...in...here. " His gaze went from the man's face to the door.

"Don't give me s.h.i.t, kid," the man responded. "You're on your own."

"Come in!" Tommy-Ray yelled.

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!"

"Come in!"

His din maddened the man. He hit Tommy-Ray across the face, so hard the blow knocked the boy out of his grip to the floor. Tommy-Ray didn't get up. He simply stared at the door, and made his invitation one more time.

"Please come in," he said, more quietly.

Was it because he asked this time instead of demanded, that the legion obeyed? Or simply that they'd been mustering themselves, and were only now ready to come to his aid? Either way, they began to rattle the closed doors. The barman grunted and turned. Even to his bleary eyes it must have been perfectly apparent that it was no natural wind that was pushing to come in. It pressed too rhythmically; it beat its fist too heavily. And its howls, oh its howls were nothing like the howls of any storm he'd heard before. He turned back to Tommy-Ray.

"What the f.u.c.k's out there?" he said.

Tommy-Ray just lay where he'd been thrown and smiled up at the man, that legendary smile, that forgive-me-my-trespa.s.ses smile, that would never be the same again now that he was the Death-Boy.

Die, that smile now said, die while I watch you. Die slowly. Die quickly. I don't care. It's all the same to the Death-Boy.

As the smile spread the doors opened, shards of the lock, and splinters of wood, thrown across the bar before the invading wind. Out, in the sunlight the spirits in this storm had not been visible; but they made themselves so now, congealing their dust in front of the witnesses' eyes. One of the men slumped on the table roused himself in time to see three figures forming from the head down in front of him, their torsos trailing like innards of dust. He backed off against the wall, where they threw themselves upon him. Tommy-Ray heard his screech but didn't see what kind of death they gave him. His eyes were on the spirits that were coming at the bartender.

Their faces were all appet.i.te, he saw; as though travelling together in that caravan had given them time to simplify themselves. They were no longer as distinct from each other as they'd been; perhaps their dust had mingled in the storm, and each had become a little like the other. Unparticularized, they were more terrible than they'd been at the cemetery wall. He shuddered at the sight, the remnants of the man he'd been in fear of them, the Death-Boy in bliss. These were soldiers in his army: eyes vast, mouths vaster, dust and want in one howling legion.

The bartender started to pray out loud, but he wasn't putting his faith in prayer alone. He reached down to his side and picked Tommy-Ray up one-handed, hauling him close. Then, with his hostage taken, he opened the door to the s.e.x arena and backed through it. Tommy-Ray heard him repeating something as they went, the hook of the prayer perhaps? Santo Dios! Santo Dios! But neither words nor hostage slowed the advance of the wind and its dusty freight. They came after him, throwing the door wide.

Tommy-Ray saw their mouths grow huger still, and then the blur of faces was upon them both. He lost sight of what happened next. The dust filled his eyes before he had an opportunity to close them. But he felt the bartender's grip slide from him, and the next moment a rush of wet heat. The howling in the wind instantly rose in volume to a keening that he tried to stop his ears against, but it came anyway, boring into the bone of his head like a hundred drills.

When he opened his eyes he was red. Chest, arms, legs, hands: all red. The bartender, the source of the color, had been dragged on to the stage where the night before Tommy had seen the woman and the dog. His head was in one corner, upended; his arms, hands locked in supplication, in another; the rest of him lay center stage, the neck still pumping.

Tommy-Ray tried not to be sickened (he was the Death-Boy, after all) but this was too much. And yet, he told himself, what had he expected when he'd invited them over the threshold? This was not a circus he had in tow. It was not sane; it was not civilized.

Shaking, sickened and chastened, he got to his feet and hauled himself back out into the bar. His legion's labors here were as cataclysmic as those he'd turned his back upon. All three of the bar's occupants had been brutally slaughtered. Giving the scene only the most casual perusal, he crossed through the destruction to the door.

Events inside the bar had inevitably attracted an audience outside, even at such an early hour. But the velocity of the wind-in which his ghost army was once more dissolved-kept all but the most adventurous, youths and children, from approaching the scene, and even they were cowed by the suspicion that the air howling around them was not entirely empty.

They watched the blond, blood-spattered boy emerge from the bar and cross to his car, but made no attempt to apprehend him. Their scrutiny made Tommy-Ray take note of his gait. Instead of slouching he walked more upright. When they remembered the Death-Boy, he thought, let them remember someone terrible.

As he drove he began to believe he'd left the legion behind; that they'd found the game of murder more exciting than follow the leader and were going on to slaughter the rest of the town. He didn't much mind the desertion. Indeed he was in part thankful for it. The revelations that had seemed so welcome the previous night had lost some of their glamour.

He was sticky and stinking with another man's blood; he was bruised from the bartender's handling of him. Naively enough he'd believed that the touch of the Nuncio had made him immortal. What was the use of being the Death-Boy, after all, if death could still master you? In learning the error of his ways he'd come closer to losing his life than he cared to think too hard about. As to his saviors, his legion-he'd been equally naive in his belief that he had control of them.

They were not the shambling, fawning refugees he'd taken them for the previous night. Or if they had been, their being together had changed their nature. Now they were lethal, and would probably have slipped from his control sooner or later anyhow. He was better off without them.

He stopped to wipe the blood from his face before crossing the border, turned his bloodied shirt inside out to conceal the worst of the stains, then drove on. As he reached the border itself he saw the dust cloud in the mirror, and knew his relief at losing his legion had been premature. Whatever slaughter had detained them they'd done with it. He put his foot down, hoping against hope to lose them, but they had the scent of him, and followed like a pack of loyal but lethal dogs, closing on the car till they were once more swirling behind him.

Once over the border the cloud picked up its pace, so that instead of following, it surrounded the car to left and right. There was more purpose in the maneuver than mere intimacy. Spirits hauled the windows and rattled at the pa.s.senger door, finally pulling it open. Tommy-Ray reached to drag it closed again. As he did so the bartender's head, much battered by being carried by the storm, was pitched out of the dust on to the seat beside him. Then the door was slammed, and the cloud once more took its dutiful place as his train.

His instinct was to stop and throw the trophy out on to the street, but he knew that to do so would confirm his weakness in his legion's estimation. They'd not brought him the head simply to humor him, though that might be their pretense. There was a warning here; even a threat. Don't try to cheat or betray them, the dusty, b.l.o.o.d.y ball announced from its gaping mouth, or you and I'll be brothers.

He took the silent message to heart. Though he was still ostensibly the leader, the dynamic changed thereafter. Every few miles the cloud would once more pick up its pace and merge one way or another, pointing him towards more of their number; many waiting in the unlikeliest of places: squalid street corners and minor intersections (often at intersections); once in the lot of a motel; once outside a boarded-up gas station, where a man, a woman and a child all waited, as though they'd known this transport would be coming along.

As the numbers swelled, so did the scale of the storm that carried them, until its pa.s.sage was sufficient to cause minor damage along the highway, driving cars off the road, and blowing down signs. It even made the news bulletin. Tommy-Ray heard the report as he drove. It was described as a freak wind, which had blown up off the ocean and was proceeding north towards Los Angeles County.